Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association Volume 27

Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ...is about thirty miles long. It creates a lake in which the navigation for the purpose of the canal is twenty-three miles in extent. At the dam the depth of the water is seventy-five feet. As we proceed into the narrower portion, the depth reduces to forty-five feet and excavations will have to be made in order that that depth may be attained. All this white (indicating on the map) that you see means a depth of forty-five feet or more, so that from this point around by the channel for fifteen miles it is really lake navigation and there will be plenty of space for anchoring or anything else that a vessel would choose to do in a lake. The great advantage of the lake, in addition to the wide and free navigation it affords, is that it offers a safe and easy method of providing for the influx of the water from the Chagres River and these fifteen or eighteen streams that lie between the Gamboa Dam in times of flood and at other times. The lake is so extensive--it is one hundred and eighteen square miles in superficial area--that it can take in all the water that in floods will come from the Chagres and its tributaries and not feel it in the slightest. In the middle of the Gatunda, there is a hill in which a sluiceway is projected, through which the flow of water from the lake to the sea can be regulated, and the level kept at eighty-five feet. These streams are taken into the lake on the shore of the lake and at points so far from the channel for steamers that there is no danger of a deposit of silt or the mud which might fill up the channel and require constant dredging and a great cost. In the sea-level plan, it would be impossible to avoid the necessity for persistent dredging and great expense due to it. Here (pointing to the map) you...show more